


Done Dirt Cheap

by crewdlydrawn



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan), Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Assassins & Hitmen, Batman not featured, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Guns, John is 17 during sex descriptions, M/M, Pre-The Dark Knight Rises, Short, Why yes those ARE AC/DC references, in addition to the archive warning, murders, the pairing is not the focus, this fic was literally inspired by listening to AC/DC, vengeance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-23
Updated: 2016-11-25
Packaged: 2018-09-01 16:42:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8631283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crewdlydrawn/pseuds/crewdlydrawn
Summary: Unable to afford even the cheap 'justice' available in the Narrows of Gotham City, Blake seeks a hired gun to gain vengeance for his father.  Barsad is the best, and finding him may provide greater opportunities for Blake to satisfy that search than he ever prepared for.





	1. Deep In the Hole: Money Talks

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ObsessiveDebauchery](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ObsessiveDebauchery/gifts).



> Gifted to ObsessiveDebauchery (Maru) because it's as much her brainchild as it is mine. I merely wrote the words.

_Everyone dies, eventually._

Three years have gone by since a car accident he doesn’t really remember, even now.  He just knows his mother is gone, and she’s not coming back.  His mom has been gone for three years, and it feels as if those years have been trying to steal his dad away, too.  Robbie Blake is seven, now, living in an apartment in the Narrows that feels empty despite how small its space is. 

Two years of school-lunch programs, but no breakfasts, and mostly no dinners, either.  Summers are lean.  Mom cooked. 

His dad spends most nights at the bars, betting on games and races, watching the screens and yelling more often than he smiles.  He used to go alone, but now there is no one to babysit.  Robbie eats the peanuts—from any table he can reach—and bits of his dad’s food that he doesn’t finish, when he gets anything other than beer.  But the bars are loud, his homework nearly impossible to do there, and he hates the smell.  When he’s finally in school all day, he begs his dad to let him stay home alone, once the bus drops him off.  He wins.

When they are both at home, instead of the games they had once played or the quiet that had grown since the accident, there are arguments.  Phone calls that his dad yells into, argues, pleads with, and then steadily starts to ignore.  Robbie is soon ordered to never answer the phone, _or_ the door.  In time, his dad is drunk and worked up before Robbie’s even home from school, the shades all drawn, the door to their own home propped with a board holding it shut.  It gets reset the moment Robbie is safely inside.

One day, the calls just stop.  The sudden silence almost seems worse, and it lasts about a week.

After that, Robbie awakens to voices, at first muffled, then raised, another argument, his dad telling someone—or some- _ones_ —to leave, that he’s got a kid, that he just ‘needs more time’.  Robbie has heard those words many times, now, spoken into the phone.  Half-asleep, he knows he should stay put.

Until that _sound_.

It’s like thunder, but much closer.  Inside the apartment, but also outside.  Following it is a crash, and Robbie’s heart stops for a moment that feels like forever, before he’s tearing out of his room in his pajamas, rushing to the main room of the apartment to find the floor covered in blood and glass, his dad on the floor with his body all wrong.  There are two men there, too, looking ready to walk out.

One pulls a gun from a holster on his waist, and starts to aim it at Robbie, the other pushing it down.  “He ain’t worth the bullet,” the second explains, and they leave the door open when they go. 

Night air blows in from the window, broken in its frame of jagged glass, but Robbie can’t feel the cold on his skin.  He kneels down, bits of glass under his knees, but his dad isn’t moving.  His eyes are open, but he isn’t looking anywhere.

“R-Robbie,” comes as a whisper, his lips moving more than his words.  Robbie calls for him, tries to find where the blood is coming from, to stop it, but there is too much, and he lies down with him, crying and wishing he could change it, change the whole world.  A whistle calls into the night from just outside, echoing between the buildings’ walls beyond the window, and it feels like an announcement.

His dad stops moving at all, his chest still, his lips silent, and Robbie’s world is gone with nothing left.


	2. If You Want Blood, Use a Big Gun

Everyone deserves to die, and everyone does, eventually.  All that changes is the where, the when, and the how.  In Barsad’s line of work, those measly little factors are the only things he controls.  Car crashes do the same, bolts of lightning, heart attacks…  He’s no ‘act of god’, but his work is as natural as the rest of human activity—people have been killing each other since there _were_ people.  He simply does it for cash.

Now, not every case is the same.  A cheating partner, a gambling debt, a show of power, or an example made… those are Gotham’s typical.  They make sense with the rest of the city’s stench.  Not that he minds, of course.  Work is work, money is money, and a bullet means payment, no matter if it hits the chest of a school teacher, the back of a gutter rat, or the eye of a stock-market fraud. 

Occasionally, however, pleasure mixes with business, and a case of vengeance finds his wallet, like the stick of a kid that shows up one day shifting restlessly in his doorway.  Dark, dodgy eyes keep checking the hallway, despite the rest of the doors holding only empty apartments.  Privacy is invaluable, and Barsad hardly stays in the same place for long.   

“I need to hire you.”  The voice is desperate, the fingers twitching as they hold out a fistful of small, crumpled bills. 

Amusement far overshadows the initial curiosity of how this scrap found him, and Barsad lets out a dry laugh, his nose aimed at the offering.  “You can’t afford me.”  Those eyes only settle on his own right as he shuts the door on them.

His prices aren’t extravagant, but the kid still can’t afford him the next week, when he shows up again.  There are more bills, this time, but once again they’re small.  Without words, Barsad only chuckles, waves him off, and closes the door. 

A week later, the kid finds Barsad despite his shift to another of his locations for the month.  The bill wad is thicker, again, and the kid’s face is bandaged, his movements wincing.  The week after that, it’s the same, with more apparent injuries.  Barsad comes to expect the visits, though his answer remains the same each time.  It is when the collection of paper bills starts to arrive tinged with red that curiosity wins, and Barsad actually lets the kid inside.

Bloody fingerprints cover the outside of the pile sitting on Barsad’s kitchen table as he pops open a beer.  The story isn’t unfamiliar—they never are.  Childhood tragedy, some mob guys, lower class kid getting screwed over… he’s heard them _all_.  Hell, he’s created enough of them.  Logic would have _him_ on the wrong side of a vengeance story, yet here he stands sipping beer and listening.

“You wanna storm the mob lookin’ for two mystery goons?”  The full brush-off is ready, but the kid also has names.  He spits them out, his tongue a rifle, striking the syllables with careful, measured precision.  There’s something to be said for determination, and it begs the question.  “Why not just take them out, yourself?” he asks around the bottle’s mouth.  “You’ve clearly got the balls to start shit.”

The head full of dark, disheveled locks is already shaking before Barsad finishes.  “I’m too close to it.”  Hands start to pick at each other, dirt from under nails, debris from scrapes and scratches.  “I’ll fuck it up, and end up in jail while they’re out there, alive and getting off on it.  I’d rather die now, and know they’re dead, too.”  Gotham’s ‘justice’ system is hardly what most would call ‘fair’, it is true enough.

“And what if _I_ fail… what then?”  He doesn’t fail.  Ever.  Still, he’s curious.

A sharp huff leaves the kid’s lungs, first, followed by a harsh sniff and a hunching roll of his shoulders. “Then I start over with someone else.”

There isn’t anyone else, not truly.  Sure, Gotham has its fair share of guns for hire, but Barsad is the best, he knows he’s the best, and the city knows it, too, those who are aware he exists.  Even so…  “Come back next week,” he says, watching the anger boil behind the kid’s eyes, the jumps in his jaw, “I’ll decide then.”

He’s already decided, and it’s not the money.  His time is far more valuable than a couple of hundreds, but perhaps the kid, himself, could prove useful enough to make it up.  After all, he found Barsad more than a handful of times, and despite looking like a homeless beggar, had shown up with a fistful of cash that clearly took a fight and a half to make, or take.  Sending him off again, Barsad does his diligence, though the names are already known to him.  He knows exactly who they are—two enforcers who show up to babysit the hired gun, make sure he does the job right and nothing goes wrong. 

To test him, Barsad moves again.  It becomes the third location at which this kid seems to easily find him.  The inner city is a warren, and anywhere close to the Narrows even worse.  Barsad has learned it well enough over the years, but there are places and times even he would rather not be present, even for a job.  A street-rat from the Narrows with nothing to lose, and beholden to him?  Now that might be a useful combination.

“You work for me, now,” he tells him.

Twitches respond, first.  “How long?”

Time is indefinite, purposefully ungiven; he’s not sure how long he might want him around.  The men aren’t hard for him to find, but he sends the kid to scope it out, anyway.  They know _him_ , as well, from more than a dozen jobs for Falcone over the years, so it’s best to keep his face out of it, to not tip them off.  It’s not rushed—they need to watch their routines for a week or two, find all of the places they’re alone, out of the way. 

Barsad follows him.  He wants to see.  Like he thought, the kid is a shadow against alley walls, going unnoticed and moving fluidly through the side streets, at home. 

The job itself is easy.  Barsad doesn’t even need to get close to them, shooting from three rooftops away with his Barrett, confident enough to have a little fun with it.  There’s no need to move or hide the bodies, not in Gotham City.  People die.  People are shot every day in Gotham.  The sound echoes terribly, but this is the Narrows; no cops for miles, and the locals just want to stay out of it.  This part of the city is generally left to its own brand of law and justice.  He enjoys the rawness.

Typically, he’s alone on the job.  The kid insisted, though, and so they both end up on the roof, him with his rifle and the kid with an extra scope so he can watch.  For proof. 

With the barrel still cooling, Barsad sets the butt of the rifle on the roof’s floor, leaning his back against the concrete retaining wall and lighting a smoke.  “Satisfied, kid?”

“Yeah.”  He nods, and even his breathing is different.  It sped up when the men appeared below them, quickened further when Barsad lined his shots, and nearly stopped altogether as their thunder faded.  Now, his shoulders are looser, his brow smooth, and there is a harsh clarity that overpowers the hard set of his eyes, the skin around them taut but uncreased.  Smoke filters around the sweat-matted curls, and suddenly those umber irises are trained on Barsad. 

“Teach me.”

If he were more inclined, Barsad might smirk, but instead he simply takes another drag.  He could earn twice the keep he has now, with a trained but feral street kid on his leash.  “I’ll need a name, first.”  He knows it, already.  He’s known since those two names first fell from the kid’s lips, recalling the living room he’d stood across from a decade earlier, the gambling debt he’d collected payment to fulfill, the job just like any other.  But he wants to hear it.

“Blake.  My name’s Blake.”


	3. Shoot to Thrill; Who Made Who?

Blake doesn’t notice it right away.  It’s like a background noise, only heard when other sounds fade away.  As he builds his new life, it slowly creeps closer, from far off in the distance.  In truth, he isn’t even sure what’s bothering him until it’s too late, and everything goes to shit.

“You haven’t ever shot before, have you.”  The words come the first day after he asks for instruction, barely a question, and they are clipped, judgmental, and obvious.  It’s not as if he hasn’t survived in Gotham’s darkest corners, didn’t find Barsad’s hiding spots more than once, but he couldn’t be expected to be some sort of gangster all on his own.  His ears get hot before he can even answer.  No, of course he hasn’t. 

He learns. 

While some of the kids he once went to school with are finishing their senior years, a select few of those who made it through preparing for jobs or colleges, maybe a last-minute drop-out, John is learning how to keep his hands steady with a 9mm in his grasp.  He’s already left the system, disappeared, trading homeless shelters for sleeping on Barsad’s floor.  Rule number one is be no one to anyone.

_Gang-related violence leaves two dead_.  The sidelight headline is the closest to a proof he can hold, once the bodies are cleaned up, and he keeps the newspaper page folded up with the only photo he has of his parents.  It was real, it happened, and their killers are dead.  His grip is a bit steadier, the next day.

Even with his name known, he gets ‘kid’ most often.  He hates it, and the annoyance slows him down, distracts him, which seems only to further convince Barsad that it’s appropriate. 

“I _told_ you my name.  You _asked_ for it,” he reminds the man, dropping down from a fire escape ladder as he follows behind him.  He can hit pipes with accuracy from the other side of a rooftop, now, but more than a building’s distance, and he’s still wide.  Rule number three is to be as far away as possible when you kill your mark, following the second rule which is don’t miss.   _Ever_.

A tongue click is all he gets, at first, one of a dozen or more infuriating non-verbal judgments in Barsad’s arsenal.  He doesn’t take it, instead grabbing the man’s shoulder, just slightly lower than his own, and yanking hard so he’ll face him.  “It’s Blake.  Use it.”

Strong fingers dig deep into his wrist, and before he can blink, their opposite fist has snapped into his jaw and nose.  It’s not enough to break, but he sees red, wiping the same from under his nose and over his lip.  Rule number four is to never let your gun be your only weapon.

“Don’t ever grab me again.”  The order is harsh, spit out coldly.  But he doesn’t get called ‘kid’ again, for a few days.

It’s different, the next time.  Taunting. 

“Hit it,” barks the order.  Blake misses, and it grates again, reminds him of wasted ammo.  Then his arms are bracketed, tendon-tense forearms tight on his own, and a stubble-rimmed mouth is close to his ear, warming inside and out.  “Slowly,” Barsad breathes, no space between them, both sets of hands on the gun.  “Close your eyes, clear your mind, exhale, and let it go.”  He does not miss.

Teeth set at his earlobe, his neck, and shoulder.  There seems barely a set of heartbeats between the meeting of their lips and the flurry of palming, grasping and panting that leads to the cock in his ass.  It’s not his first, but it is the first he feels the most present for, the first he feels he _chooses_.  It feels equal.  Until he’s still hard, after.  “Does it ever go down, once it’s up, kid?”   

Trying to switch roles only leads to a near fistfight, and John is left to rub himself out, alone.  The need for it comes to him less and less often, the longer he stays.  For a while, they fuck after each job, adrenaline and the smell of gunpowder the only necessary trigger, and Blake needing to burn off the high.  Their arguments, too, for a time, cause his blood to run south. 

His increasing skills and independence on their jobs leads to a growing ability to ignore his hard-ons, to say ‘no’ when he finds himself uninterested.  Swift elbows to the nose do the trick, when words don’t.  

Blood runs over bristle the first time he strikes, and for a moment Barsad seems stunned.  “ _Bitch_ ,” is growled at Blake in the same second in which he’s shoved against the wall, bloodied lips harshly finding his.  He can feel the man’s erection against his thigh, the heat in his breath as blood smears over both their faces, but he is left alone, on the break of the kiss.  It is a victory.

Even if it isn’t said, Blake knows when his debt is paid off.  Barsad doesn’t give him exact numbers, but he can see the bills he tucks away, he has learned the indicators of a rich client, and he’s started to notice how many of those ‘clients’ are directly involved with the mob.  There is plenty of money, and not much of it is going to Blake, for his efforts.  It leads to another fight.

The “You get your share” argument is tired, now, with what he knows.  ‘His share’ should be at least three times larger.

As Blake watches, Barsad goes right back to his food, not bothering to even look at Blake to brush him off.  Nostrils flared, Blake pays him the same respect, not another word spoken as he goes for his coat, filling a messenger bag with his meager belongings.

“Going somewhere?”  He hasn’t even looked up.

Inhaling through his nose, the sound sharp as the air between them, Blake steps up beside him.  “I’m leaving.  I’m done.”  After only a second, his announcement gets a laugh.  A hand waves him off, and he is bid good luck on his own.

“I made you, kid.  Remember that.”

Blake doesn’t look back when he leaves.

It’s not easy.  Barsad doesn’t actively block him, but Blake isn’t known on his own.  Yet.  People die every day in Gotham.  At least half the time, those deaths are planned, and more than half of those, paid for, in one way or another.  Opportunities find him. 

Their paths don’t cross for several months.  Blake knows which locations Barsad uses to crash and when, able to stay ahead of his pattern yet keep familiar walls around him.  He hadn’t thought he would need to be prepared for the quiet, most of his life has been spent alone, but it suits him ill all the same.

He is sent to a mark for a debt, but hears a shot before his own, from inside the apartment.  No one else should be there, and so he carefully investigates, finding that his mark did the work for him.  The smell of his blood and the sight of pieces of him on the wall send Blake to the toilet.  He had cried too much to be sick, the first time he’d seen that much gore, and has since forced the reflex down.  Now, he cannot hold back a decade’s worth exiting his stomach. 

They start within a week, the specters from his past.  They aren’t always when he’s asleep.  Sometimes, it is just a sound, a smell, or a color that flashes a scene into his mind.  An argument at a diner sends muffled voices through his memory.  One his father’s, defensive, distraught, and promising.  The others threatening, cold, reminding.  They are familiar.

Another hit, he has to deal with mob goons as escorts.  He insists that he is capable, and they know who taught him, but the order comes from Falcone’s associates, and they always send a man or two on big-paying or big-owing jobs.  Blake has seen them work with Barsad, at times, to the man’s distaste.  They tell him to ‘man up’ and deal with it.  He doesn’t like to take the debt crowd, but most of the people who owe Falcone money turn out to be scum, as well, so it feels right. 

“Pack yourself up at the whistle,” one tells him, before they split up.

“What?”  It catches him off guard, and something in the back of his mind nags at him, like déjà vu, but he can’t place it, even as the guy repeats himself in frustration.  They’ll whistle for him when they know the guy’s down for the count, so that he can leave.

Blake gets the ‘all-clear’ signal after the job, and puts it out of his mind.  That is, until it comes back on its own.

That night, Blake dreams about a neighbor he once had, who made tea every afternoon after he was home from school.  Sometimes, she’d invite him over to share it, and he could even hear the kettle from across the hall, doors closed.  This time, he hears the whistle, and it’s loud, but echoing around him, and she’s already pouring the tea in front of him, but he can’t see anything else.  Instead of mugs, it is glasses, and with the whistle’s shrill still in his ears, the glass explodes, bits and pieces flying everywhere.  He screams, looking down at his hands, covered in blood.  The pop of the glass wakes him.  His body is shaking, shivering, cold, and soaked in sweat like a fever.

It happens the same way, each night.  Two weeks of the same. 

The next job is for Falcone.  He is told, unnecessarily, not to ‘fuck up’ before he splits with his escorts and heads for a rooftop in Old Town.  It’s a richer place, so the debt is probably bigger.  Blake wishes that meant his payment was bigger, too.  Hooking his leg over the last ladder rung up top, he also wishes he had thought of a good line for when he next saw Barsad.

“This is _my_ job,” he says, instead, startled and left with petulance in lieu of the cool detachment he would have practiced as he turns to find the man sitting on the rooftop already, assembling his own rifle. 

“It is, unless you fail,” Barsad answers from behind his sight, calibrating it before fixing it to the barrel, his voice far too calm, “then, it is my job.”  Not one glance is spared at Blake.

Jaw ground tight, he sets himself up, not arguing, not giving him that, and gets eyes on the penthouse apartment.  What he sees makes him want to take back his claim.

In addition to the mark, a man in his 40s, there is a woman in the room, as well as two small children, no more than eight years old.  Blake lowers the scope, then looks again.  They’re still there.

“We can’t—”

“Yes,” Barsad interrupts, his eye on his sight, safety off, “we can.  And we are.”  None of the arguments Blake has land on the man, and even though Blake doesn’t even assemble his own gun, a gun he’s proud of and worked for, the shot goes off.  He can only watch as the man goes down, his family falling to his side as the two goons leave the inner door open.  Blake’s mind spins.

His dad is on the floor, blood everywhere.  Glass… glass is everywhere on the floor.  On the floor, from the window.

The window.

Neither man had a gun in his hand.  The window was broken.  His dad owed Falcone.

There was a third man.

“The kids—” he stumbles over the words, his feet stepping him back without his permission.

“The kids don’t matter, only the job.”  Barsad is already packing up, and only then does Blake realize the whistle came from the alley below.  “They don’t see me, they never see me.  It doesn’t matter.”

Pieces start to come together.  Barsad’s ready recognition of the mob thugs’ names.  _The kids don’t matter_.  The way Barsad had nodded to himself, ever so slightly, when Blake had finally given his own name.  _They never see me_.  The man’s insistence that he had ‘made’ Blake. 

Because he _had_.  Except that he had made him over ten years earlier.

“You’re thinking about it,” the voice pierces his thoughts, “aren’t you?”  Those blue eyes are ice cold as they watch his, colder than the city around him has ever felt.  “About how there had to be another trigger man, beyond those two useless bookends.”  There is no tease, no taunt or pull, only a frigid curiosity.

Color begins leaving the world, fading inward from the edges of his vision.  He no longer notices the dingy yellow street lights, the patchwork laundry strung between tenement buildings.  Not even the half-lidded azure irises register, anymore.  Shades of grey slowly tinge red.

“It was _you_.”  Fists ball at his sides, hairline tremors creeping down his legs.  “All this time…  _You_ shot him.”

“Very good.”

The red consumes him.  It is all he sees.


	4. Shot Down in Flames, Hell Ain’t a Bad Place to Be

Training the kid is easy.  He takes to it like a natural, his only needs direction and patience, when Barsad can spare them.  Perhaps it is an irony that he should teach a kid to kill when he once made that same kid an orphan, but it doesn’t bother him.  It bothers him even less to coax the boy into pleasuring him. 

It was not his intention, instructing closely, to fuck Blake.  In fact, Barsad didn’t give the gaunt frame a second thought until it was against his chest, beneath his palms, and until he could feel the over-eager beating of a desperate heart.  At that, he couldn’t help himself, or, if he _could_ , he simply didn’t bother trying.  There is nothing sentimental in his motions, only the pleasure of taut skin, of lean joints and an eager little cock that doesn’t want to quit after it shoots.  He is tempting, despite gangly limbs and too-rushed movements. 

Amusement comes when Blake tries to reverse roles, but Barsad makes certain the point is clear; he is the only one in charge.  The only small loss he allows comes in the form of denial.  He supposes he shouldn’t be surprised, the first time he’s hard from the kid lashing out and injuring him.  It just didn’t bother him that the taste of blood—no matter whose it was—was a ready aphrodisiac.  The punches, he deserves, though he deserves the sex more, in his mind.  Still, it isn’t wanted as often as he’d like.  Few things in life leave a foul taste in his mouth, with rape topping the list, and he will not force Blake to fuck him.  Reminding him of his place, with each shove and growl, is enough. 

Money is the first thing on Barsad’s mind, but keeping Blake around proves useful even after any possible debt is paid in full.  Providing for two isn’t much different than providing for one, and Blake’s needs are as simple as Barsad’s.  His keep is earned well even without sex as payment, but Barsad takes no pains to let on that he has broken even, or beyond.  He had only done Barsad a favor by allowing him to escape the aim of his vengeance, even unwittingly; why spoil it, unnecessarily?

Not too much a fool, Blake figures it out on his own.  There is little point in trying to stop him, once he wishes to leave.  Part of Barsad is relieved for the space, the quiet, the return to the more familiar routines, and his pocket is roomier for the change.  As much as he claimed to doubt, he knows the boy could work for himself, however, and that means only one thing:

Competition.

Barsad does not _have_ competition.  There are others available for hire, for the uninformed, those not local, but Barsad is well established, and never misses a call that could come his way.  Low rates always keep business with him, rather than with infiltrating ‘professionals’. 

Blake, however, starts out charging less, and is nowhere near quiet about it. It is not hard for him to get work; Barsad is aware of it, despite not bothering to watch for himself.  His own network keeps him well enough informed.  Despite modest successes, most of Gotham’s trash funnels through Barsad’s door, alone.

A shift is evident once one of Falcone’s associates calls for Blake, instead.  What began as an annoyance officially becomes a problem.  Problems require solutions.

Normally, he might snuff such competition, slim as it is, simply for having the nerve to work his city, but in part the inconvenience is still small, and so far leaves his name in people’s mouths, and in another part, he’s curious.  It is a morbid thing; can Blake make it on his own?  With no prop?  It is that same curiosity leads him to allow the kid access to the Falcone job.

Not without his resources, his strings to pull, he makes a deal disguised as vetting a potential trainee.  The job was his, promised to his own pocket, but he lets them pick up Blake, lets him think he is in, while Barsad sets up on the roof. 

A new irony presents itself in the broken apartment building across the street.  A mark with a family, kids in the room.  Poetic, maybe, but Barsad doesn’t concern himself with anything so grandiose.  Perhaps it will merely close a loop, either destroy the kid or create a new man.  Maybe both.

Barsad isn’t certain if he cares which one wins out.

By the time Blake makes it to the rooftop, his steps silent but his breathing loud and clear to trained ears, Barsad has already settled, and begun setting up his rifle.  Blake’s shock is expected, including the arguments and protest, the lack of preparation, but Barsad hadn’t truly expected the kid to put the old puzzle together from the scene in front of them.  Not that he cared.  So what if he knows, now?  Their partnership, such as it was, is over, and it is all so far behind Barsad that he ignores it—simply takes his shot, waits for the whistle, and begins to disassemble the Barrett.

“You’re thinking about it, aren’t you?”  It is nothing to acknowledge it as he works.  “How there had to be a third man.”

Though he can’t see it, Barsad can nearly hear the realization dawn fully on the boy’s head.  “It was you… You shot him.”

Praise sent back is only half-hearted, an acknowledgement, in its tone, of exactly how long Barsad has known, and exactly how little it matters to him. 

He doesn’t see the fist approach, but Blake’s feet are telling, and he ducks away, scattering rifle components across the rooftop in the process.  Swinging to his feet, he is nearly tackled even as his boots scrape tread against grit and gristle.  Hands grasping and bracing against shoulders squared in his direction, tilted forward to lend weight to their charge, Barsad gets a good look at Blake’s face, and nearly stumbles for it. 

For all the anger generally present, the intensity, the fire, there now is nothing.  The muscles in his face are slack, his eyes hard but vacant, yet the rest of his body seeming possessed as he grapples for purchase. 

His frame is slim, and should be easily overpowered, and yet Barsad’s feet slide backwards.  Knees buckle beneath his hips, and he has to roll to break free of the hold.  Success is tempered by hard contact to his jaw, a well-placed hook.  Spitting blood, he hits in return, into it now, trading blows and dodges back and forth before kicking Blake’s knees out from under him.

“Get up.”  The words smack the rooftop like the blood spat from his mouth.  Destroyed or remade, Blake will leave the moment broken, Barsad will make sure of it.  When the kid doesn’t rise, he sends the toe of his boot into lean ribs, their owner sprawling in quick tumbles.  “Worthless.”

He turns, intent on at least shoving the pieces of his rifle into his duffle before leaving.  Motion registers in his vision, but it is a slow thing, and he ignores it in favor of unzipping the bag.  A staggering form looms in his peripheral, and he stands.

“If you’re going to get up,” he drops the strap, hands free, “fight me or go home.”

Though sudden, he is prepared for the rush, the advance, and he catches Blake’s shoulders as his body slams into him.  More force than before, Barsad’s own shoulders hit the rooftop, the impact driving the air from his lungs in a solid punch.  It takes a second, an attempt to reclaim that oxygen, for him to realize what he missed.

Pain radiates from his belly.  It is more sharp, more true, and more _wrong_ than any he has ever felt.  Brows furrowed, he tries to make sense of it even as it comes again, and again.

A knife. 

That has to be it.  Trying to grab for it is too slow, his hands not obeying quicker than Blake’s ready strikes. 

“Y-You…” he can only choke on his words, unable to swallow, to breathe.

“Never let your gun be your only weapon.”  His own rule is spat in his face, the face above it returned to itself, sure, clear, and full of a hatred Barsad can feel against his skin.

No more words come, but that face, those eyes, they watch him until he can no longer see from his own.  Panted breath echoes above him, turning to scraping footsteps as the city’s sounds fade away.

_Everyone dies, eventually._


End file.
